Eva Marie Saint, Oscar winner for On the Waterfront, dies at 102

Eva Marie Saint, the actor who won an Academy Award for her first film, On the Waterfront, and starred opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, has died at her home in Los Angeles. She was 102. Family representative Jeff Sanderson confirmed the death, and a family spokesman said she died of natural causes.pbs.org

Saint's death closes a career that ran from her first stage appearances in 1942 to her final film appearance in 2019, spanning eight decades and every major medium from radio and live television to podcasting. She was one of the last survivors of Hollywood's golden age of the 1940s and 1950s, and her work continued well into her 90s.abc.net.au

A debut that won an Oscar

Saint's debut in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront in 1954, as Edie Doyle, the love interest of Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy, brought her the Oscar for best supporting actress the following year. She accepted the award while pregnant with her first child, and her son Darrell was born two days later. The film received eight Oscars in total.aol.co.uk

Kazan spotted Saint in the Horton Foote play The Trip to Bountiful and invited her to audition by improvising a scene with Brando, she told the Santa Barbara Independent. The instruction was to stop a young man from entering her apartment. 'Marlon got in the door and turned on the music. We started dancing. He flicked my skirt,' she told the Los Angeles Times in 2001.

Rather than sign a studio contract, Saint turned down offers including The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Summer and Smoke and The Rainmaker, appearing in only seven films in her first decade in Hollywood. Her husband, television and stage director Jeffrey Hayden, persuaded her to accept Hitchcock's North by Northwest, the 1959 thriller in which she plays a spy who falls for Grant.

A career across eight decades

Hitchcock wanted Saint in a more glamorous setting than the tenement of On the Waterfront. 'It's drab in that tenement house. Women go to the movies, and they've just left the sink at home. They don't want to see you at the sink,' he told her. In North by Northwest she played Eve Kendall, 'a blond who has all the answers', in a story that ends with a chase across Mount Rushmore.

Saint's film career after North by Northwest was uneven: Exodus in 1960 was a hit, while All Fall Down in 1962 lost money at the box office. Her parts dried up in the 1970s and 1980s, and she turned to television, winning an Emmy in 1990 for the miniseries People Like Us and appearing in Moonlighting and Frasier.

Her later work reached new audiences through new formats: she played Superman's adoptive mother Martha Kent in the 2006 film Superman Returns, voiced a role in the animated series The Legend of Korra from 2012 to 2014, and appeared in the scripted comedy The Pack Podcast aged 98. Her final onscreen role was in Winter's Tale.

Saint was born in Newark, New Jersey, on 4 July 1924, and grew up in Delmar near Albany, New York, where her father managed a Goodrich Rubber Co. plant. She trained at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and the Actors Studio, where she credited coach Lee Strasberg with helping her overcome shyness. She married Jeffrey Hayden in 1951; they had two children and stayed together until his death in 2016.